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Movie Reviews, & Film Industry Commentary
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1927 – NR – Original Time 75 Minutes ; Restored Running Time 48 Minutes
Director: Tod Browning
Primary Cast: Lon Chaney, Marceline Day, Henry B. Walthall, Percy Williams, Conrad Nagel, Edna Tichenor
Stars *** (of 5)
Popcorn ** (of 5)
Film Type(s): Horror, Silent, Drama, Vampires
Synopsis: A Woman is haunted by the ‘living corpse’ of her dead father in this infamous horror film. Mr. Balfour died under mysterious circumstances, with strange things happening around his daughter, Lucy (Day). It is enough that Professor Burke (Chaney) begins to investigate, meeting much resistance from those that were around Mr. Balfour at his death, including Sir James Hamlin (Walthall) and his nephew Arthur Hibbs (Nagel) and seems baffled by a fang-toothed, wide-eyed stranger that has moved into Balfour’s old house with a pale woman. In due course we learn (and as Chaney fans will easily figure out) that Balfour and the stranger are in fact the same man and the whole thing was a charade to unveil the true murderer to Scotland Yard. The film was later remade in sound by Director Browning as Mark of the Vampire, with Lionel Barrymore as Burke and a Post-Dracula Bela Lugosi as the stranger. Due to deterioration and other causes, no complete print exists of this film, but a truncated version using the original script and production stills was aired on cable in 2002.
Review: Considered by some as the best of the “Lost” silent films, this film is one of the best arguments for the film preservation movement. Although met with mixed reviews upon release, people flocked to see this movie and in fact made it the most profitable Lon Chaney – Tod Browing collaboration ever and, depending on the accounting, one of the biggest financial success’ of the silent film era. In spite of this, the only complete print was lost in a fire in the 1960’s and what few prints do exist are too brittle for even preservation. In 2002, however, film preservation expert Rick Schmidlin (who had previously re-stored Willem Stroheim’s silent film Greed to its original eight hour length) attempted to re-piece the film together using a shooting script, production stills, and interviews with the few members of the original 1920’s audience that had seen it. Although he made excellent use of Silent Film Re-Scorist Robert Israel’s music and used pans within the stills to provide some movement, much is lost to the ether because there is no activity to draw the eye and we aren’t able to see the subtle-ties of the acting or set design. (For example, the interviews with old audience members compared the strangers’ walk to a stooped over Groucho Marx-like walk – the production stills don’t imply such movement.) Chaney’s movie makeup, however, is excellent, making us believe he is two people with his overt touches applied to the stranger’s wide-eyed skeletal look and more subtle ones to appear as an old Professor. Horror Film Buff’s of the studio era argue over which version is better, the original London After Midnight or its re-make Mark of the Vampire; an argument made all the more heated due to the lack of a complete print for Midnight. |
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